Human Structure Research Articles

Potential impacts of climate change on marine wild capture fisheries: an update

SUMMARYThis paper provides a brief update on the potential impacts of climate change on marine ecosystems and marine wild capture fisheries based on the scientific literature published since 2007. Current models predict shifts in fish distributions of 45–60 km per decade, with 0·80 of species moving poleward. With a high CO2 emissions scenario, little overall change in the global maximum potential fisheries catch is projected (±1%), although with high spatial variability: decreases of 40% are projected for the tropics, with increases of 30–70% for higher latitudes. Tropical nations appear to be most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change on fisheries production. Coupled atmosphere–ocean–fish production–human society models are beginning to be developed for specific market systems. Results suggest that how society responds can have as large or larger an effect as the strength of the climate impact. Good observations of the impacts of climate change exist for high latitude, coral reef and North Atlantic systems. Management strategies are being developed to address climate change and fisheries, including risk and vulnerability assessment frameworks, pro-active planning with stakeholders regarding potential impacts and responses and examining existing regulations to identify gaps created by altered species distributions (e.g. unregulated fishing in newly ice-free areas). Overall, fisheries governance systems are needed which are flexible and can quickly adapt to changing ecological and human societal conditions. Significant knowledge gaps include a comprehensive and co-ordinated global network of observations to help distinguish climate change from variability, and increased detail in the structure and processes of models. Necessary next steps include reducing the uncertainties of climate impacts models at present, understanding the synergistic effects of multiple stressors and the inclusion of humans into coupled models and socio-economic analyses, in particular at regional and local scales. In the intermediate term, developing nations in tropical regions are likely to be most negatively impacted, whereas developed nations at higher latitudes are most likely to benefit. In the longer term, overall marine food security will depend on the impacts of climate change on marine primary production, for which the present projections are highly uncertain. Adoption of an integrated social–ecological approach that improves the adaptive capacities of ecological and human social systems will help to sustain food security from marine wild capture fisheries.

Simulating communication and interpretation as a means of interaction in human social systems

Human social systems are the most complex systems that we can conceive of, as interaction among their members is by messages that have to interpreted before they can take any effect – and the interpretation of identical messages sent and received in identical situations can have divergent effects as human actors have long-term memories, which makes the effects highly path dependent. The emergent phenomena in human social systems are therefore even more difficult to understand than related phenomena in anthills or chemical systems. This paper introduces models of immergence and second-order emergence to explain the innovation of norms in human groups of moderate size – as opposed to the emergent phenomena in human crowds, which are quite similar to the phenomena that can be observed in physical and animal systems. Modeling the innovation of norms and norm systems makes it necessary for interactions between model agents to be manifold and path dependent, that is agents have a long memory and deliberation capabilities. This is shown with an example from modeling criminal or terrorist behavior.

Vulnerability in Contracting: Teaching First Year Law Students About Inequality and its Consequences

Traditional legal pedagogy fails to demonstrate the relationship of contract to the subordination of vulnerable populations. As a result, students rarely see the complex web of interrelationships where economic activity takes place or the legal regime that maintains it. Students are not taught how to interrogate the discourse or dismantle the systems and structures that oppress subordinated communities. This Essay describes a technique that we have developed to help students learn the meaning of law and its cultural, social, and structural significance. The traditional framing of the study of contract doctrine as one that is objective, neutral, and fair avoids any examination of human nature, subjective reasoning, or social structure. The challenge is to encourage students to think about the culturally-specific assumptions that inform our understanding of exchange – specifically, that deeply held sentiments about the appropriateness of the behavior of contracting parties are related to the relative position of the parties and the groups to which they belong, the context in which the transaction occurs, and the nature and subject matter of the exchange. A teacher who ignores the relationship between contract rules and social structure deprives students of a deeper understanding of economies and the ways in which lawyers who are concerned about inequality and poverty might use the law for social change. We believe it is imperative to teach students three things: (1) that law creates, supports, and reinforces the relationships of inequality that exist in the United States; (2) that the law can and sometimes does compensate for the economic and social disadvantages inherent in a segmented and stratified social system; and (3) that if the law recognizes the agency of individuals who are members of subordinated communities, it can be an instrument of social change. This Essay provides concrete examples of how to introduce issues of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and disability into first year courses. Proposed exercises provide practical guidance and specific questions that can be posed to students to promote a meaningful discussion of what the law does and what the law could do to address the effects of economic disparities, prejudice, or discrimination.

Global changes in marine systems: A social–ecological approach

This paper presents the case for the adoption of a social–ecological approach to marine systems, which recognises the interdependence of biophysical and human social components. It discusses the management and governance challenges that arise when biophysical marine systems and fishing-dependent human communities, considered as interdependent marine social–ecological systems, are stressed by global changes. Drivers of change in marine biophysical systems include processes such as climate variability and change, human processes such as fishing, habitat degradation, and contaminants, and their interactions. Fishing makes marine populations, marine communities, and ecosystems more sensitive to climate forcing. Human communities’ responses to marine ecosystem variability can ameliorate or exacerbate these changes. Drivers of change in fishing-dependent human communities include environmental and resource changes, human social changes relating to demographics, health issues, and shifting societal values, and their interactions at local and global scales. This multi-faceted interdependence means that fisheries management needs to develop approaches which maintain the capacities of both fish and fishing communities, acting as interactive social–ecological systems, to adapt to the impacts of globalization and environmental change. In general, a less-heavily fished marine system managed on an ecosystem basis is likely to provide more stable catches under normal conditions than would a heavily fished system. However, under climate change the whole ecosystem may alter in ways that cannot yet be predicted. Issues of scale are crucial, and fisheries governance needs a concerted effort to contrast and compare multiple local management ‘experiments’, since the exposure, susceptibility, and adaptive capacities of biophysical and human social marine systems varies immensely. These ‘experiments’ should be conducted in developed and developing nations so as to understand the range of policy issues which support marine social–ecological systems in an era of global change.

Criminalizing Ecological Harm: Crimes Against Carrying Capacity and the Criminalization of Eco-Sinners

This article examines how a broader class of environmentally harmful behavior can be examined from a criminological frame of reference. By using examples of soil degradation and anthropogenic climate change, it is argued that environmentally damaging behavior is similar to many other types of crime. Particularly when taken from the standpoint that environmentally harmful behavior is ultimately detrimental to human social organizations by undermining ‘carrying capacity’, outright criminalization might strike many as a valid option. Nonetheless, there are also some fundamental differences that will ultimately prevent a strict legalistic perspective from being successful in minimizing ecological harm. Instead, this article argues that criminologists need to emphasize the importance of shaming and status rewards in pursuing a greener future.

Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgencency (review)

John D. Kelly, Beatrice Jauregui, Sean T. Mitchell and Jeremy Walton, eds., Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgencency. University of Chicago Press, 2010. 383 pp. This ambitious collection of twenty-two chapters is accompanied by a general introduction with short ones at the beginning of each of its five sections, authored by the editors. The book results from a University of Chicago funded conference and presentations at an American Anthropological Association panel. It is packed with interesting, sometimes obscure information and sure to stimulate discussion. The editors describe the volume as placing anthropology in the context of the new stress on the relationship among anthropology, governance, and war (leading me to ask: Why not peace as well?). The 22 contributors address the ethical problems confronted by anthropologists as they conduct research in the context of modern warfare and international and localized power relations. By so doing, they reflect upon the of Pax Americana and how that translates to this century. Emphasizing that they received no funding from the US military, including Minerva funding, the editors note that their contributors include several who have or are participating in military actions. Their perspectives are set amidst those of other anthropologists and social scientists who discuss cases from differing viewpoints. Treating this hot button issue for anthropology is a tall order of course, if for no other reason than that it centers on topics that have been debated for decades: ethical issues concerning an anthropologist's relationships with those under study, about doing no harm to such persons as a result of the research, about having their informed consent, about the principled nature of anthropological research, and who, if anyone, is served by it outside of the discipline. The issue of anthropological involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, human terrain action research, and participation in promoting American hegemonic agendas by anthropologists are featured in detail, starting with the book's introductory chapter. The editors cum authors assert, following Max Weber, anthropology will be plural. And it will be united by rigorous and comparative attention to empirical detail. Science cannot render political value judgments, but for good judgments...it is necessary. They consider that competent ethnography is essential for political decision-making and policy. Anthropology is therefore seen as the key in pursuit of a world safe for differences. But is that what China, the US, Iraq, or any society that desires to be self-determinate, wants? Unfortunately, the goal and value of difference is not shared by quite a few xenophobic, ethnocentric nations whose state cultures accept their own particular configuring of the nature and order of things in the world and their role therein as ideal. A problem lurks in the elevation of ethnography to such a primary status because, as it is described here, it seems to reduce the discipline of anthropology to being a method of discovery, showing an inevitable pathway to truth. Although the authors allow as how anthropology as a science cannot evaluate values, such issues nevertheless, form an undercurrent running through the volume. The approach here, then, is to stress Anthropology as a methodology- as opposed to a discipline-that is anchored around theoretical concepts and tested understandings about how human cultural and social systems operate. By illustration for example, an online business website extols that: Ethnography is a versatile tool, fitting many different research needs...ask yourself, what do we need? Perhaps ethnography will be the right fit for you (/www.contextresearch.com). The editors appear to subscribe to the aphorism that the facts speak for themselves, but do they speak equally to everyone? Dustin Wax notes in her chapter that allegiance to a particular political order can shape the ethnographer's observations and how these data are used. …

Both subject and object: herding, inalienability and sentient property in prehistory

This paper advocates a social approach to domestic animals in prehistory, one which situates herding practices in their (human) social context while also recognizing the status of animals of social beings in their own right. Domestic animals, it is argued, represent sentient property in the sense that, despite being incorporated as ‘objects’ into property relations between humans they remain subjects whose social world overlaps with that of humans. This tension between the status of domestic animals as subject and as object is played out in highly context-specific ways, being linked both to human social organization and to material/geographical aspects of herding practices. These ideas are used to develop a model for the role of cattle in a process of social change that took place during the later Neolithic Vinča period in the central Balkans.

Love as a Hidden Gender Resource in Chinese Immigrant Women’s Entrepreneurship

Although there has been an increased research interest in recognizing entrepreneurship as an individual strategy, most literature disregards the interplays of human agency and social structure to entrepreneurship. Despite some recognition of emotion in making economic decisions among entrepreneurial discourses on human agency, aspects of emotional capital in explaining motivation to entrepreneurship has been overlooked. The application of the notion of love as an individual strategy for entering business is still unprecedented. To fill these gaps, we aim to bring “love” as a form of emotional capital to the centre of analysis by relating a number of “love stories” that illustrate the motivation for entrepreneurship in a group of 125 Chinese immigrant women in Sydney, Australia, and Richmond, Canada. Using these women’s own accounts of their experiences, this paper attempts to demonstrate that emotion is embedded in economic behaviour when love is used as a resource to enter entrepreneurship. In addition, we intend to explore the dynamics of motivation by intersecting love with the women’s biographical factors, connecting gender, race, ethnicity, class, immigration, and opportunity structures.BR How do Chinese immigrant women in our studies mobilize love as a form of emotional capital to enter entrepreneurship? First, we recognize that the love relation is the underpinning of family relations, which are based on normative giving. Second, we recognize that these women have taken patriarchy as natural, seeing the maintenance of family relationships and solidarity as wives and mothers overriding their own self-interests, to the extent of self-sacrifice for the good of the family. Failing to do so would result in self-blame, guilt, and shame. We therefore postulate that women are motivated by love as a gender resource that is grounded in culture to enter entrepreneurship for the purposes of marriage and family maintenance and economic survival. Further, we suggest that the mobilization of this form of emotional capital is a rational choice, given the adverse situations these immigrant women and their families face as they struggle against structural barriers and scarce opportunities resulting from immigration.BR Love as a gender resource for entering business can be manifested in different ways. Some women were driven into entrepreneurship out of “self-sacrifice” in terms of “giving” for the love of their husbands. Some did so to “give face” or “save face” for their husbands while others did so through contributing their “labour of love.” Others sacrificed their entrepreneurial ambition to “give time” to care for their husband and children. To these women, the business project is a project of love.BR The motivation for entry into entrepreneurship is a complex phenomenon as seen from the experience of this group of immigrant women. By allowing the delineation of the intersections of self, marriage and family, class, race/ethnicity, immigration and settlement process, labour market experience, and opportunity structures, this study opens up new space for future research to help fill the gaps and expand the horizon in our knowledge claims on entrepreneurship.

Students, teachers and alternative assessment in secondary school: Relational Models Theory (RMT) in the field of education

The quality and types of relationships formed between students and teachers has been shown to play an essential part in the personal and academic success of students (Davis, 2003; Pianta, 1999). Little, however, has been done to determine the role that assessment plays in teacher-student relationships. Drawing upon the work of cultural anthropologist Alan Fiske (1991), I explore the ways in which certain basic forms of relationships (known asRelational Models) are initiated and maintained in secondary school through the use of alternative assessment methods — narrative evaluations, portfolios, rubrics, and end-of-year presentations — in place of traditional letter grades. In his Relational Models Theory, Fiske posits that human relationships and social systems are culturally-specific implementations of four elementary Relationship Models: “Authority Ranking”, “Communal Sharing”, “Equality Matching”, and “Market Pricing”. Here, I discuss how the non-traditional assessment methods used at a progressive secondary school in California allow relationships between students and teachers to shift away from an exclusively authority-based system (the Relational Model of Authority Ranking), towards a more nuanced model of negotiation (Market Pricing) and communal input (Communal Sharing) — ultimately leading to more empowered and involved students.

Playing Chicken: Technologies of Domestication, Food, and Self

To engage the mediating and enabling aspects of food technology, I reflect in this essay on my (rueful) attempts at raising chickens. As an incompetent chicken-raising hobbyist and an STS-trained scholar, I came to view my chickens as technologies themselves—results of human interactions with nature, through the overarching frame of domestication. Viewing the chicken–human relationship as a technological one has allowed me to foreground several elements at once. First, the chicken and the systems that sustain it put in stark relief the process of defining nature very specifically. Certain aspects are coveted and augmented while others are disregarded or overcome. Thus, technology does not strictly demarcate artificial from natural, but rather restricts or accommodates fuller forms of nature. Second, these definitions of nature (the chicken in this case) stabilize and enable other technological forms that take the initial stability for granted (e.g. human social and geographic organizations premised on industrialized agriculture). Third, these systems of stabilities, premised on necessarily partial versions of nature, complicate normative decisions on proper human–chicken relationships. In creating a uniform animal, and a relatively cheap and stable source of protein, we have empowered identities that can think about food less as necessity, and more as choice. As a result, we as consumers become increasingly dependent on the systems of domesticated nature that make such choice possible. And when the chicken itself becomes a product of that lifestyle choice (expressed as an element of consumer behavior), its very skeletal structure becomes optional.

Resource Competition and Reproduction in Karo Batak Villages

When wealth is heritable, parents may manipulate family size to optimize the trade-off between more relatively poor offspring and fewer relatively rich ones, and channel less care into offspring that compete with siblings. These hypotheses were tested with quantitative ethnographic data collected among the Karo Batak—patrilineal agriculturalists from North Sumatra, Indonesia, among whom land is bequeathed equally to sons. It was predicted that landholding would moderate the relationship between reproductive rate and parental investment on one hand, and the number of same-sex siblings on the other, among boys but not girls. The predicted interaction effect was observed in interbirth intervals and immunizations, but only a trace of the effect was detected in age-five mortality. The study raises questions about the coevolution of human behavior and social structure.

Unravelling the neurophysiological basis of aggression in a fish model

BackgroundAggression is a near-universal behaviour with substantial influence on and implications for human and animal social systems. The neurophysiological basis of aggression is, however, poorly understood in all species and approaches adopted to study this complex behaviour have often been oversimplified. We applied targeted expression profiling on 40 genes, spanning eight neurological pathways and in four distinct regions of the brain, in combination with behavioural observations and pharmacological manipulations, to screen for regulatory pathways of aggression in the zebrafish (Danio rerio), an animal model in which social rank and aggressiveness tightly correlate.ResultsSubstantial differences occurred in gene expression profiles between dominant and subordinate males associated with phenotypic differences in aggressiveness and, for the chosen gene set, they occurred mainly in the hypothalamus and telencephalon. The patterns of differentially-expressed genes implied multifactorial control of aggression in zebrafish, including the hypothalamo-neurohypophysial-system, serotonin, somatostatin, dopamine, hypothalamo-pituitary-interrenal, hypothalamo-pituitary-gonadal and histamine pathways, and the latter is a novel finding outside mammals. Pharmacological manipulations of various nodes within the hypothalamo-neurohypophysial-system and serotonin pathways supported their functional involvement. We also observed differences in expression profiles in the brains of dominant versus subordinate females that suggested sex-conserved control of aggression. For example, in the HNS pathway, the gene encoding arginine vasotocin (AVT), previously believed specific to male behaviours, was amongst those genes most associated with aggression, and AVT inhibited dominant female aggression, as in males. However, sex-specific differences in the expression profiles also occurred, including differences in aggression-associated tryptophan hydroxylases and estrogen receptors.ConclusionsThus, through an integrated approach, combining gene expression profiling, behavioural analyses, and pharmacological manipulations, we identified candidate genes and pathways that appear to play significant roles in regulating aggression in fish. Many of these are novel for non-mammalian systems. We further present a validated system for advancing our understanding of the mechanistic underpinnings of complex behaviours using a fish model.

The regional differentiation of society: general types of development processes

This contribution deals with general problems concerning typologies of development processes. The previously developed classification of real systems was utilised as a point of departure for this evaluation. At the level of societal systems, three basic types of real systems, in terms of their level of structural complexity, are distinguished in this classification: human populations (for example demographic systems), social systems and socio-geographic systems. The development of the organization of these systems differs according to size and structural indicators. While, in terms of structural/generic indicators, there are always processes of re-homogenization, the orientation of such processes is always different, on the basis of size indicators: in the case of demographic systems, re-homogenization; for social systems, the reproduction of partial hierarchization; and for socio-geographical systems, re-hierarchization.

End User Development and Meta-Design

The first decade of the World Wide Web predominantly enforced a clear separation between designers and consumers. New technological developments, such as the participatory Web 2.0 architectures, have emerged to support social computing. These developments are the foundations for a fundamental shift from consumer cultures (specialized in producing finished goods) to cultures of participation (in which all people can participate actively in personally meaningful activities). End-user development and meta-design provide foundations for this fundamental transformation. They explore and support new approaches for the design, adoption, appropriation, adaptation, evolution, and sharing of artifacts by all participating stakeholders. They take into account that cultures of participation are not dictated by technology alone: they are the result of incremental shifts in human behavior and social organizations. The design, development, and assessment of five particular applications that contributed to the development of our theoretical framework are described and discussed.

Morphogenesis versus structuration: on combining structure and action1

The fundamental problem of linking human agency and social structure stalks through the history of sociological theory. Basically it concerns how to develop an adequate theoretical account which deals simultaneously with men constituting society and the social formation of human agents. For any theorist, except the holist, social structure is ultimately a human product, but for any theorist, except advocates of psychologism, this product in turn shapes individuals and influences their interaction. However successive theoretical developments have tilted either towards structure or towards action, a slippage which has gathered in momentum over time. Initially this meant that one element became dominant and the other subordinate: human agency had become pale and ghostly in mid-century functionalism, whilst structure betook an evanescent fragility in the re-flowering of phenomenology. Eventually certain schools of thought repressed the second element almost completely. On the one hand structuralist Marxism and normative functionalism virtually snuffed-out agency-the acting subject became increasingly lifeless whilst the structural or cultural components enjoyed a life of their own, self-propelling or self-maintaining. On the other hand interpretative sociology busily banished the structural to the realm of objectification and facticity-human agency became sovereign whilst social structure was reduced to supine plasticity because of its constructed nature. Although proponents of these divergent views were extremely vociferous, they were also extensively criticized and precisely on the grounds that both structure and action were indispensable in sociological explanation.2 Moreover serious efforts to re-address the problem and to re-unite structure and action had already begun from inside 'the two Sociologies',3 when they were characterized in this manichean way. These attempts emerged after the early sixties from 'general' functionalists,4 'humanistic' marxists5 and from interactionists confronting the existence of strongly patterned conduct.6 Furthermore they were joined in the same decade by a bold attempt

Biodiversity Loss Affects Global Disease Ecology

Changes in the type and prevalence of human diseases have occurred during shifts in human social organization, for example, from hunting and gathering to agriculture and with urbanization during the Industrial Revolution. The recent emergence and reemergence of infectious diseases appears to be driven by globalization and ecological disruption. We propose that habitat destruction and biodiversity loss associated with biotic homogenization can increase the incidence and distribution of infectious diseases affecting humans. The clearest connection between biotic homogenization and infectious disease is the spread of nonindigenous vectors and pathogens. The loss of predators and hosts that dilute pathogen transmission can also increase the incidence of vectorborne illnesses. Other mechanisms include enhanced abiotic conditions for pathogens and vectors and higher host-pathogen encounter rates. Improved understanding of these causal mechanisms can inform decisionmaking on biodiversity conservation as an effective way to protect human health.

The evolutionary and ecological roots of human social organization.

Social organization among human foragers is characterized by a three-generational system of resource provisioning within families, long-term pair-bonding between men and women, high levels of cooperation between kin and non-kin, and relatively egalitarian social relationships. In this paper, we suggest that these core features of human sociality result from the learning- and skill-intensive human foraging niche, which is distinguished by a late age-peak in caloric production, high complementarity between male and female inputs to offspring viability, high gains to cooperation in production and risk-reduction, and a lack of economically defensible resources. We present an explanatory framework for understanding variation in social organization across human societies, highlighting the interactive effects of four key ecological and economic variables: (i) the role of skill in resource production; (ii) the degree of complementarity in male and female inputs into production; (iii) economies of scale in cooperative production and competition; and (iv) the economic defensibility of physical inputs into production. Finally, we apply this framework to understanding variation in social and political organization across foraging, horticulturalist, pastoralist and agriculturalist societies.

The ecology of social transitions in human evolution

We know that there are fundamental differences between humans and living apes, and also between living humans and their extinct relatives. It is also probably the case that the most significant and divergent of these differences relate to our social behaviour and its underlying cognition, as much as to fundamental differences in physiology, biochemistry or anatomy. In this paper, we first attempt to demarcate what are the principal differences between human and other societies in terms of social structure, organization and relationships, so that we can identify what derived features require explanation. We then consider the evidence of the archaeological and fossil record, to determine the most probable context in time and taxonomy, of these evolutionary trends. Finally, we attempt to link five major transitional points in hominin evolution to the selective context in which they occurred, and to use the principles of behavioural ecology to understand their ecological basis. Critical changes in human social organization relate to the development of a larger scale of fission and fusion; the development of a greater degree of nested substructures within the human community; and the development of intercommunity networks. The underlying model that we develop is that the evolution of 'human society' is underpinned by ecological factors, but these are influenced as much by technological and behavioural innovations as external environmental change.

On the Increasing Vulnerability of the World Ocean to Multiple Stresses

This review focuses on the increasing vulnerability of the world ocean to multiple anthropogenic stresses in the latter half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century. The multiple stresses, which affected the world ocean in the latter half of the twentieth century, could have been controlled on a timescale of decades, had governments and their subjects chosen to do so. In the twenty-first century, the timescale of remediability has been observed to shift from decades to centuries and even to millennia. The major additions to the suite of multiple stresses consist of the combined impacts of changing ocean thermal structure and increasing acidification, both of which are the results of increased anthropogenic CO2 emissions. The consequences of these recent changes are assessed. The assessment makes clear collectively what is known and unknown and what responses are available to human social systems to adapt to these accelerating changes.

Envisioning the Archival Commons

This article proposes an archival commons to support networked documentation efforts. It envisions a peer-based framework for the assembly, arrangement, and representation of related resources within the context and systems of archives, libraries, and cultural heritage organizations. The commons will expand involvement of users, leverage existing discovery tools, and reduce the cost of coordination associated with the documentation strategy. Using Giddens's theory of structuration and the roles of human agency and social structure, the authors propose basic functionalities to be provided by an archival commons. These functionalities would broaden the ability to form social memory in a commons-based environment supported by the economic idea of archival materials as nonrival goods.